Lausanne, Switzerland, January 17, 2017 - Biowatch SA, a Swiss start-up, has successfully closed last December an oversubscribed first financing round at CHF 1.2 million to accelerate the development of its solution on biometric authentication for wearables. This seed round is following a CHF 800k grant from the CTI in last February and a CHF 100k loan from the FIT last June. It was led by serial entrepreneur and business angel Patrick Delarive with participation from the Venture Capital fund Polytech Ecosystem Ventures and SICPA Finance. Further investments from various business angels completed the investment.
Sébastien Marcel head of the biometrics group at Idiap speaking at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD)
To speak Chinese without having to learn it or to being able to speak for yourself: these dreams may become reality thanks to the progress of speech synthesis. American informatics giants are working on it, with Adobe and its project VoCo. But they are not the only ones: the Idiap Research Institute of Martigny also specializes in this domain.
It is supposedly one of the most promising solutions for protecting us from terrorist attacks. Biometrics allows identifying a person by their biological characteristics like finger prints, the iris or the face. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, technological solutions have known a fast progress: facial recognition software, “cerebral fingerprinting”, automatic control systems for moving crowds…But can we really trust biometrics with our security? And above all, what happens if these data fall into the wrong hands?
Sébastien Marcel is an unlikely judge of beauty queens, but his face recognition expertise could finally solve the identity of an Indian woman on a precious Swiss watch.
Ivana Chingovska received the PhD degree from EPFL on May 2nd 2016 after the public defense of her doctoral dissertation entitled: "Trustworthy Biometric Verification under Spoofing Attacks: Application to the Face Mode".
Idiap published a book chapter entitled “Face Recognition in Challenging Environments: An Experimental and Reproducible Research Survey” appearing in the Springer book “Face Recognition Across the Imaging Spectrum”.
After 4 years of development, the BEAT platform is now available for download as an open-source project, under the Affero GNU GPL version 3.
Voice identification, facial recognition, fingerprint reading or heartbeat analysis: biometric identification methods will be used more and more this year on mobile phones and online payment platforms at the expense of the usual password.
Idiap published on Feb 18 2016 a PCT patent on biometric vein anti-spoofing (also called presentation attack detection) under the reference WO/2016/023582.
The project TeSLA, led by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), with a length of three years and a budget of seven million euros, involves universities, quality assurance agencies, research centres and technology companies from twelve countries. In total, there will be a team of around eighty professionals and eighteen months of largescale pilot tests with the participation of over 14,000 students from Europe.
CSEM at Neuchâtel and the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny are joining forces to propel the young and promising Swiss startup BIOWATCH to the top
The BEAT platform is an European computing e-infrastructure for Open Science proposing a solution for open access, scientific information sharing and re-use including data and source code while protecting privacy and confidentiality. It allows easy online access to experimentation and testing in computational science. The platform also provides an attestation mechanism for your reports (scientific papers, technical documents or certifications).
The Swiss Centre for Biometrics Research and Testing and the Biometric group at Idiap Research Institute organize the Speaker Anti-spoofing competition.
It is a Swiss premiere. The Idiap Research Institute in Martigny receives this week delegates from all around the world that have the task of creating the famous ISO standards. They will discuss about the standards in the domain of biometrics. The Idiap researcher Sébastien Marcel explains the procedure and the stakes of this scientific meeting.
Sébastien Marcel, head of the Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing at Idiap talks about Standards in Biometrics on local media rts.ch
Jan 19 2016 afternoon
The MOBIO database consists of bi-modal (audio and video) data taken from 152 people. The database has a female-male ratio or nearly 1:2 (100 males and 52 females) and was collected from August 2008 until July 2010 in six different sites from five different countries. This led to a diverse bi-modal database with both native and non-native English speakers.
The BEAT platform is an European computing e-infrastructure for Open Science proposing a solution for open access, scientific information sharing and re-use including data and source code while protecting privacy and confidentiality.
Idiap Biometrics group was awarded the 2015 IET Biometrics Premium Best Paper Award for the paper:
A new research project will provide authentication and secure access to banking and other services over broadband and mobile networks by using biometric identifiers.
SC 37 Biometrics January 2016
Good bye Laurent
It’s time for change !
Each year the IET awards a prize to the authors of the best paper published within the last two years in each of the IET’s journals.
The Multispectral-Spoof face spoofing database is a spoofing attack database build at Idiap Research institute. It contains images of real accesses recorded in VIS and NIR spectra as well as VIS and NIR spoofing attacks to VIS and NIR systems.
AVspoof is intended to provide stable, non-biased spoofing attacks for researchers to test both their ASV systems and anti-spoofing algorithms.
The Biometric group at Idiap Research Institute is releasing its new version of biometric tools for face and speaker recognition, including a number of state-of-the-art preprocessing, feature extraction, machine learning algorithms, evaluation metrics and database protocols.
The Biometrics group was chosen by Google to participate to a confidential on-invitation-only research sprint on mobile biometrics along with more than 20 experts from 16 institutions worldwide. The group was able to carry out biometrics research on a 40 Tb dataset from 1500 data subjects.
The Idiap Research Institute and Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse Occidentale, Switzerland, just released the VERA palm-vein and VERA spoofing palm-vein databases.
Biowatch SA raises CHF 1.2M seed round to finalise its disruptive wearable biometric authentication solution
